Scathing report blasts ‘high-speed car crash’ of Lib Dem general election campaign

Party review finds ‘wishful thinking’ behind decision to present Jo Swinson as PM-in-waiting

A scathing internal post-mortem of the Liberal Democrats’ disastrous general election has blamed over-optimism on the anti-Brexit campaign and some improbably positive polling results for a campaign which turned into a “high-speed car crash”.

Buoyed by apparent public enthusiasm for their Stop Brexit campaign and new leader Jo Swinson, the party took a “high stakes gamble” in backing a general election at the time of Boris Johnson’s choosing and fighting it on the twin messages that Ms Swinson could become prime minister and would revoke Article 50 to keep the UK in the EU without a referendum, found review chair Dorothy Thornhill.

It ended with “disaster” on 12 December with the loss of the leader and all of the high-profile Labour and Tory defectors who had joined the parliamentary party, leaving Lib Dems with a rump of just 11 MPs.

Surprisingly positive results from an MRP (multilevel regression and post-stratification ) constituency-level poll paid for by a donor led the Lib Dems to target a wide range of seats where they had little presence on the ground and no history of electoral success, to the detriment of genuine battlegrounds like Ms Swinson’s own Dunbartonshire East, which she lost to the SNP by 149 votes when it could have been “saved” by a determined ground campaign, said the report.

MRP polls are a recently developed technique that aims to give a more detailed prediction than a standard opinion poll.

The review suggested that the gender of the party’s first female leader – in the job for just five months – may have played a role in the defeat, citing research which suggests women leaders need more time to establish themselves in order for voters to “‘get someone different from the ‘norm’”.

It was “wishful thinking” for the party to believe that their own enthusiasm for Ms Swinson was shared by voters as a whole and to build the Lib Dem campaign around the idea that she was “Your candidate for prime minister”.

“Previously net-positive ratings for Jo fell during the campaign,” found the report. “There was clearly a lot of misogyny and sexism at play, and Jo’s appeal to women also fell significantly during the election.”

The party failed to target the black and ethnic minority voters who could have made the difference in many London seats. And its policy of revoking Brexit “alienated large chunks of the population”, even among those who voted Remain.

After her election in July 2019, Ms Swinson established “an ‘inner circle’ of advisers at arm’s length from the resources of the party machine, and put decision making in the hands of an unaccountable group around the leader,” the report found.

Faced with the choice between two “hellish” scenarios of adopting a Stop Brexit strategy by standing down in seats with pro-Remain Labour MPs or denying Mr Johnson an election at the risk of seeing him drive a no-deal withdrawal through, the team around Ms Swinson showed a “lack of strategy and clarity in decision making” by instead claiming they could avoid both options by fighting and winning a general election.

“We adopted a bunker mentality, sticking rigidly to a single course of action despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” the report concluded.

“Nobody intended it to be how it was, but the outcome was catastrophic. We were poor performers in an election which we helped to call, and in which poor planning, leadership and decision making compounded to give us such a poor result.”

However, Lady Thornhill’s report said the seeds of the debacle were sown long before Ms Swinson’s arrival and before the Brexit vote, describing a “rift” between central HQ and activists, governance structures which had been “a mess” for some time and “out of kilter” leadership responsibilities in a “dysfunctional” organisation.

“The culture, structures and processes at HQ need serious changes,” said Lady Thornhill. “These will be far reaching and deep rooted. The necessary repairs and improvements will take time.

“Some local parties were left feeling hurt and damaged by individual issues that happened to them. Swathes of seats, around the country that were not on the ‘infamous’ target seat list felt justifiably abandoned and neglected. Healing these wounds has to be the top priority of all of us in different ways.”

Lib Dem president Mark Pack – who took office days after the election defeat – said: “This review challenges us to change as a party and to change the country for the better. It makes a series of clear recommendations about how we can improve and build a strong force in local, Westminster and devolved governments.

“We have started already. We have successfully pushed the government into changing its policy on compensation for relatives of NHS staff, on furlough for workers and on support for self-employed people. With the help of this review, we can achieve even more successes in future.”